Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @04:50PM
from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.

dcblogs writes "Despite the fact that technology plays an increasingly important role in the economy, IT wages remain persistently flat. This may be tech's inconvenient truth. In 2000, the average hourly wage was $37.27 in computer and math occupations for workers with at least a bachelor's degree. In 2011, it was $39.24, adjusted for inflation, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. That translates to an average wage increase of less than a half percent a year. In real terms, IT wages overall have gone up by $1.97 an hour in just over 10 years, according to the EPI. Data from professional staffing firm Yoh shows wages in decline. In its latest measure for week 12 of 2012, the hourly wages were $31.45 and in 2010, for the same week, at $31.78. The worker who earned $31.78 in 2010 would need to make $33.71 today to stay even with inflation. Wages vary by skill and this data is broad. The unemployment rate for tech has been in the 3-4% range, but EPI says full employment has been historically around 2%."

If you're a competent programmer and live in the SF Bay Area, wages are definitely not flat, to the point of absurdity. There are kids just coming out of college making $80k or more as a starting salary, and quickly rising up to $120k+ within only a few years of experience.

See, learning new skills should improve your pay, but even without it your pay should be going up steadily just to account for increases in the cost of living. Hell you should be beating that for a while just because of the additional value you gain simply through experience.

Yes, training matters so you have trained up and seen your wages go up and you think that is good but the fact of the matter is they haven't gone up by as much as they should because you are working from a flat baseline while cost of l

Spoken like a middle manager who has no idea how much their low quality IT is impacting performance of other workers or hindering their business. They think a professional is expensive, but they are shoveling money with no results. In car analogy, they would rather pay someone to take apart their car with a $200 set of craftsman tools and no experience, then take it to a mechanic who can do the same job at book rate in 1/4 to 1/10 of the time. They think it's a bargain because they are getting more hours, meanwhile less is getting done and it's getting done in the worst possible way.

They think it's a bargain because they are getting more hours, meanwhile less is getting done and it's getting done in the worst possible way.

It seems that particular idiotic management mentality will never die.

I had a position a while back where I took over for someone who had the companies entire infrastructure thoroughly messed up. He meant well, just didn't have the slightest clue what he was doing. It took me about 2 weeks to put things in order and automate a large number of tasks. At that point, I could get my job done easily in 4 to 6 hours a day.

When it came time for my 6 month review, it was mediocre at best, without the pay increase that I had been expecting. My predecessor was held up as a shining example of what they were looking for, since he was hard at work all day, and frequently stayed 2 or 3 hours late in the evening. No mention was made of the fact that their systems were now running smoothly and that the only reason the guy put in so many hours was that it took him that long to come up with even band-aid solutions.

Needless to say, I moved on to a much better environment shortly thereafter.

This is the same mentality that prevents telecommuting from being offered even when it would be a great deal for all parties. It's all about being able to "see" you work, with no regard given to the quality of the product of that work.

You don't have to go far at all, or even choose a bad neighborhood. Think, Point Richmond, Richmond Annex, El Cerrito, Daly City, South SF...not to mention much of Oakland (you only think it's dangerous).

>1500 for a two bedroom unit is steep compared to other parts of the country, but hardly unaffordable on $80k/yr.

It is if you are saving properly for a downpayment and a 401k.

Lose your sense of entitlement. $80K/year, -20K taxes, -18K rent = $42K/year. You are doing way better than most people.

So you want to exclude $15K pretax for your retirement and maybe $15K so you can have a downpayment in a few years? You still have $1K/month for food, drink, and fun. You are doing pretty damn well for a young person.

Don't forget, the "fiscal cliff" means that those making over $72k will go from paying their unfair share of about 14% to their fair share of about 27%. Don't worry, you're rich. The truly wealthy? Well, they'll go from paying their unfair share of about 35% to their fair share of about 39%.

There's a reason George Lucas sold his assets before Obama was re-elected. He knows the hammer (and sickle) is coming.

If you're a competent programmer and live in the SF Bay Area, wages are definitely not flat, to the point of absurdity. There are kids just coming out of college making $80k or more as a starting salary, and quickly rising up to $120k+ within only a few years of experience.

If you're a competent programmer in the Bay Area you work in product development, not IT.

I hear this a lot, but as someone who lived a good life for a few years in the Bay Area on a grad-student stipend, I don't really believe it, at least if you don't have kids. I don't understand how single people could make $80k and feel they can't handle the cost of living, unless it's due to social factors (all their friends make more, so they're spending a shit-ton of money on bars, restaurants, and other entertainment).

two factsthe average ceo in 1970 earned $500,000 in 2000 it was $5,000,000the average empolyee in 1970 earned $19.26 in 2000 it was $19.74

The exact numbers are off a little bit as I am going form memory the fact is unless your on the board of directors your pay has been basically flat. IT is just the lastest group to be shafted by corporate boards.

Remember it is perfectly fine for a company to fire 1,000 people and then pay the board those people's salaries as executive compensation. Wall street supports such moves by increasing your stock price.

10 years ago I was making $80k/year in the Monterey area. You certainly can live on that, if you stay the hell out of a house. I rented an apartment for $900 per month. Cheapest house I saw was half a million for a tiny, run down 1950s house with 2 bed, 1 bath. I could have had something for "only" $300k in Salinas, about 20 miles away. But something else to think about is the lack of job security. And sure enough, that job ended in a total train wreck. I could have entered into a brutal mortgage, only to have to sell a year later. Sales commission of something like 5%, plus property taxes (I never did find out how bad that was), and most of all the fact that in the first years of a mortgage one does not make much headway on the principal, means I could have easily forked over $50k or more for the privilege of living in a house in California for 1 year. The only thing that would have saved the situation was that houses were still bubbling up at that time. But suppose I had bought a house, and the bubble had burst during the year I was there, and I go underwater on the mortgage? Despite making $80k, I would have lost money on the deal, and would have been better off if I'd been unemployed rather than take that job in California.

If you're thinking only a dummy would have bought a house, remember at that time it was inconceivable that a house could turn into a bad investment like that. Many people advised me in all seriousness to buy a house. A few of these were my bosses, who leaned on me to commit to a major buy so that in their eyes I would be a more "reliable" employee. That's all part of the management theory of "hold gun to employee's head". I would work harder, because if things blew up I would lose my home. Well, to use a car analogy, pulling off a miracle by making the car able to go 300 mph does not help if the management can't figure out which road to take. And if I also had car payments, a student loan, and a family to support, what would have happened? I can imagine the student loan administrator hammering on me to make payments since I was employed, ratcheting up the rate perhaps even as the house was drowning me.

So, yeah, $80k per year is not enough to bail you out if you in all innocence pursue the American Dream and it turns into a nightmare. The American Dream wasn't supposed to be a trap.

Buying a home is indeed absurdly expensive. But obviously I didn't exclude the cost of paying rent in my calculations, because I actually lived there, and actually paid rent! I paid about $1400 for a 1-bd apartment. That's $17,000/yr, which should certainly be doable if you make $80,000/yr.

I really fucking hate yardwork, so I personally wouldn't agree with that, though I agree plenty of people would.

You can spend a portion of the money you save by living anywhere else, hiring someone else to do the yard work for you. Then you have this other money you can spend too.

The California distortion field is strong on slashdot. For example, people that think its reasonable to pay $800K for a condo, and people that think $1400 is reasonable for a one bedroom apartment.

In almost the entire country, $1400 is more than a mortgage payment on a very nice house. If you live in California then the odds are very good that you don't really have a grasp of the typical cost of living anywhere else. This is why Californians cannot comprehend how someone could live on $45K/year (the national median) elsewhere in the country, or why $20/day is actually extremely nice pay in China putting Foxconn workers on the road to early retirement.

I guess I don't know about actual SF; never lived in the City. But I lived in the Bay Area making $30k and I felt like I was doing fine. Paid about the same as you for an apartment, which took a bit over half my income. Spent the rest on groceries, craft beer, and miscellaneous entertainment.

Let's say in addition to $18,000 / yr on rent, you spend $2,000 / mo. on food, and the same amount on each on health care and discretionary spending. That's $90,000 / yr. You probably [money-zine.com] pay about $35,000 in taxes, leaving you with $90,000.

So you should be breaking even if you are spending literally $4,000 on food and luxury items every month.

Really, eating restaurant meals 3 times a day? That's part of your problem.

I also make $125k and likewise, my take-home is about $6100. I spend even more on rent for a 1-bedroom than you, and my student loans are higher, and I do just fine:

$6100 take-home after taxes/insurance/401k

-$1800 rent

-$ 250 utilities (soon to be $190 once I'm sure I like the 100min/5GB $30 T-Mobile plan)

-$ 400 cost of living ($8 lunch each day, one $20 dinner a week, and about $150 in groceries a month)

-$ 900 student loans

Leaves me $2750, much of which I can put toward paying off my loans faster, after which I'll start really focusing on saving. As for transportation, I walk to work. The central location is why my rent is so high, but I offset that by not having the expense of a vehicle. I get free public transit, but even if I paid for it, my transit trips would probably only cost me about $20/month. If I really want to drive somewhere, there's Zipcar.

I grew up in a working poor family, so maybe I just know how to manage money better than some people. As it is, I feel guilty about my $8/day lunches when I could probably pack my own lunch for $1/day. That's ~$150/mo I could be saving, all without any real decrease in quality of life.

And let me emphasize: that $2750 I'm left with is more than most people in this country gross. The median personal gross income in the U.S. as of 2005, among people over 18, was $24,062. Adjusting for inflation (I couldn't find current data), that's $28,500, or $2375 a month. Even if you look at the over 25 numbers (I'm under 25, btw, and I suspect you are, too), my spare cash after all my expenses still exceeds the median net income (though not quite the gross).

TL;DR: We have more disposable income than more than half the people in this country gross. Even with your wasteful spending, you have $1555 a month left, which is far more disposable income than most people in this country have. You have no reason to complain.

There is a huge talent shortage in the bay area. If you are decent at problem solving, algorithms and coding you almost need a baseball bat to keep the recruiters away. The ads don't say "programmers wanted". They say "Come work for us! We have an unlimited vacation policy, all meals provided, on-site gym, a collaborative culture, and give meaningful equity".

Parent is correct. I also work in the Bay Area for a medium sized software company, and we're constantly starved for talent, and engineers who know what they are doing are in high demand. Hell, even engineers who do not know what they are doing are getting work. You could literally not know how to program, and still get a programming job for $75K if you can at least spell C++.

Adding to that, they are comparing wages between 2000 and 2011. One is the peak of the dot-com boom, the other is now. If they compared between 2001 and 2011 or 2002 and 2012, they probably will have a different picture.

Their comparison is like comparing Banker wages between 2007 and 2011 and claiming that bankers are underpaid on a 5 year basis. In the case of bankers, they are paid more than twice average national wage in both 2007 and 2011, but compared to a boom they are not doing as well now.

Adding to that, they are missing the top wage earners, who have retired, and are now including the n00bs who are earning entry level (for their position) wages.

If we went through a recession, and the several bubbles which have burst, and you only track individuals, there are some people who have lost jobs but average earnings are up. This is not a debate about how much people earn, which is where most people above gp were talking about.

The topic at hand is this - if IT is important to the world, why are they not paying IT people more?

The assumptions in the questions are beyond idiotic. As a whole, should everyone in IT be paid more just because we are important to the economy? Or are we just displacing people and earning their salaries?

How many people worked in tech, multiplied by their salaries? And compare that to now?

The still sluggish U.S. economy gets most of the blame for this wage stagnation, but factors such as outsourcing and automation also contribute to the problem, say analysts.

"IT salaries have not really kept pace with inflation," said Victor Janulaitis, the CEO of Janco Associates, which reports on IT wage compensation.

In 2000, the average hourly wage was $37.27 in computer and math occupations for workers with at least a bachelor's degree. In 2011, it was $39.24, adjusted for inflation, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Adjusted for inflation, we are $2 ahead. How does Victor's quote mean anything when placed directly next to a quote disputing it? Adjusted, we are ahead.

Why Are IT Wages Flat? First paragraph - outsourcing, automation, and economy. WTF are the rest of you babbling on about?

That translates to an average wage increase of less than 0.5% a year.

Including all of the people who took retirement or quit for other industries, and all of the n00bs. The rest is explained in the article, leading to b4dc0d3r's law: NEVER read an article with a headline posed in the form of a question.

The real story is the EPI report, second link. Microsoft wants more H1-B visas, which is not new in the least. Microsoft wants to pay people from lower wage countries less money to work in the US. If you spot the conclusion, good for you. Microsoft wants to keep wages flat.

As a large tech employer, and someone who is lobbying for cheap labor, it's kinda obvious to me that dcblogs (submitter) is intentionally misusing statistics, and a poorly written CNET article, to prattle on about H1-B visas.

Why is there an assumption that inflation-adjusted wages must rise, either in general (chart in parent) or in IT (article)?

Because productivity is much higher.

So employees make more "stuff" per hour. That stuff gets sold, so the company makes more money in the same time.

The way it used to work was those productivity gains resulted in wages for everyone going up. Now, only executive wages are going up. Those wages and various Wall-Street-related things are taking the entire productivity gain.

However, when shit hits the fan the skillsets that an IT professional have plus the penchant that most IT Pros have regarding troubleshooting and diagnosis is invaluable. If your website is dead in the water you're not making any money. If your network is breached you arent making money, you may be losing valuable company secrets to your compeditors.

What is probably on the decline or 'flat' is the guy who takes your computer, wipes the spyware and viruses off it and gives it back to you. People with real IT skillsets are only going to go up.

That's for managing existing equipment. It is easy. The real work comes with project planning and execution, having that insight of where you're going and what it'll take to get there and having a backup plan to get out while maintaining your uptime.

People might confuse you for some sort of communist if you keep talking like that...

No really, part of the issue here is that if one underpaid worker tries to demand better compensation, they'll just be replaced with someone else who doesn't mind the low compensation. People are trained from an early age to believe that janitorial work deserves low pay, and so if they are looking for a job cleaning toilets they generally expect low pay.

Exactly. Wages have to due with such things as barriers to entry, need and ability to supervise, as well as skill set. Importance of job seldom has anything to do with it. For example, executive officers are not necessarily paid well because they have important jobs, but because they they are dishonest, cannot be effectively supervised, and so they are paid high amounts to not screw the firm.

Cleaning staff, however, can be easily supervised, intimidated, and if they do not do a good job the repercussions are limited. There is also a low barrier to such a job.

What I think has happened, particularly in the past 10 years, is that software used to track IT resources has become very sophisticated. It has made it possible for the real software development to be executed by the average person. It has also allowed automated supervision IT staff. More business rules are encoded in the management packages.. In the 80's and 90's one had to have trust that the person who was working IT. Now the tools are there to not only check on the developer daily, but automated difficult tasks.

So just like any other industry, automation has made highly skilled workers redundant. We no longer need a tailor to make our clothes. Anybody off the street can cook your food. Modern check out registers means that we no longer need have trust in our cashiers. And since so much IT is simply clicking icons and plugging things into other things, with measures taken to insure they cannot be plugged in wrong, there is really no reason a semi-literate person off the street can't be successful with minimal training.

Spoken like someone who's never seen a successful software company go under because years of junior developers made the system more and more impossible to maintain to the point that clients had to be told their defects were either unfixable or would take 6 months to fix at which point the clients went somewhere else. Yeah, unskilled workers can do the job just greeaaaat.... Good luck with that.

Income growth has been shifting since the late 1990s from middle class to upper-middle and wealthy class.

In fact in many sectors, incomes have been shrinking for those in lower management and below. Meanwhile, incomes of upper management (i.e. CEOs, University administrative staff) - basically people who really don't work or anything productive - have been sky rocketing.

IT is very important... but as a CEO I don't want to pay a lot for it.

I attribute that quote to one of those Wall Street types or sales guys who measure their success entirely by the size of their paycheck. "That engineer only makes $80k and has a tough job that required a complex degree with lots of math in it! What a maroon!" The engineer looks at the Wall Street guy making 3/4 of a million per year and goes "That guy hates his job, is always stressed out, works 90 hours every week, has no hobbies because his job is his life, any family he has he barely sees, it's kind of sad. Why make so much money if you won't get to spend it until after you're all burnt out?"

Plus the Engineer gets the satisfaction of actually being productive and making something instead of just being a leeching middleman. And no, "liquidity" is not a product.

Years and years ago, when Michael Dell was maybe about 30, they asked him why he didn't sell Dell, retire, and have some fun. His answer was "What could possibly be more fun than running a billion dollar computer company?"

But they are only dumb to people who think wealth is the key to happiness. Most engineers I know are smarter than this and simply want an above-average job where they aren't worked to death and have family time. This makes them happy.

I highly doubt this is the problem. At our company we will hire anyone who is really good at what they do. There simply aren't that many people. The US is cranking out people with degrees who pretty much suck. The rest of the world isn't doing any better but if you have 8B people pick from inevitably a good number are really good.

I look at our company and others and the guest workers are all there because they were better than the domestic applicants. Some of whom are not only better but unique and n

Yeah but the national median level of education, training, and experience is only slightly above a zoo monkey, so only getting paid a tiny bit more for knowing a heck of a lot more seems a bit out of proportion.

Actually birthrates are at a 90 year low, no longer making up for population loss. That is actually a much bigger problem than population gain, and is endemic of the lowering % of americans who are capable of being in the middle class and lack of social programs to support families which have taught people having children is more trouble than it's worth.

Most middle or working class occupations are suffering from *declining* pay. Holding steady is good these days. And think of all the people who were making $50K or $75K a few years ago and are now working for $10/hour or less.

the "Quit complaining and count your blessings" demands are what we've been getting told for decades by those at the top, "Cry me a river", the sad part is now we repeat it to eachother, ignorant of the fact that they were merely telling us that crap to protect their own raising income. Look at the year-over-year income rise % since the 60s, it is amazingly ridiculous how much CEO income raises have gone up in % over the years, not in total. Also look at the % of population in the middle class vs. % of population in the lower class since the 60s. Come back when you think we should all just keep sucking it up and aren't convinced if we continue to "Quit complaining" the middle class won't be gone altogether.

Last quarter the economy's profits grew quite a bit over previous quarters, however hiring remained flat. Quit complaining and work more hours, at least you've got a job right?

Management is attempting to commoditise the IT workform however this relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of what IT is meant to do. IT is meant to either replace or augment people. Paying peanuts to commoditise your workforce and using BA to provide the insight is an attempt to apply Taylors principles to this problem. However it doesn't work in practice. Business needs to employ evolutionary models of software and system design and employ capable practictioners.Rule 1 If you can innovateRule 2 If you

My company prides itself on being "competitive" - which I take to mean they don't pay any more than they have to. The economy is in the tank, so they pay less (or lower raises) - you know, to be "competitive". After all, where else are employees going to go in this job market?

Because of capitalism. Those who do the real important work never get what they are actually worth, as it would cut into the profits made by executives and investors. The labor market cannot ensure that people get paid what they're worth--by which I mean the value they produce--because there's almost always someone willing to do it for less. We under cut each other fighting for scraps, and those at the top keep the bulk of what we produce. This is how capitalism works.

So if it's okay to tax my investments as ordinary income, then you should be okay with taxing all capital gains as ordinary income. Right?

Wasn't the whole point behind taxing capital gains at a lower rate to encourage investment? And yet here I am, "investing" what will be taxed as ordinary income. So the lower capital gains tax isn't necessary to encourage investment after all.

I have been an investor for a long time. Here's a secret: It takes money to make money. If you start out with $5000 and you double it, you have $10,000. If you start out with $500,000 and double it, you have $1 million.

Here's another secret. If you're working at MacDonald's, you won't have a whole lot left over to buy shares with at the end of the week compared to the person whose paycheck is $150K/year. And it's not just in raw dollars. The $150K guy doesn't need to buy 10 times as much in the way of daily

I am surprised that it has take the world so long to realise that IT salaries are overpriced. Because the hardware used to be so rare and expensive the people who used it and looked after it were also rare and expensive.Now that the hardware is cheap as chips, and the labor market is approaching truly global is it a big surprise that salaries are flat?

If a bad patch breaks my two year old $500 company laptop or a $200 tablet I am not going to pay somebody to fix it. I replace it and move my data over. There was a time when PCs cost thousands, and servers cost tens of thousands. People won't pay people $100/hr to fix a $200 devices.

I also imagine that it is a heck of a lot cheaper to engage off-shore programmers than using local resources (you can't do that for a truck driver...) - supply and demand in a free market in action.

This is common across all sectors and all skill levels.The corporations have set things up so that the owners and managers capture all of the profit and any productivity gains. They have also bought enough politicians to keep their tax rates low so they don't have to contribute to the "general welfare". Corporate profits and upper management incomes are at record levels.The situation with tech wages is the same as that with WalMart employees. You are expendable and replaceable and if you make trouble you will be fired so just sit down and shut up and get to work. At least tech wages are above poverty level so they don't have to go on Medicaid and food stamps to survive... be thankful for small favors.The last time things were this far out of kilter was the 1930s and that gave rise to the union movement (as well as socialists and communists). This time, people seem more complacent and are just happy to have small crumbs.

It could be that all those occupations are deserving of higher pay. Companies would not last long without competent workers, just like they would not last long without competent management, but the pay difference is not even close to being in proportion. Profit would be impossible if nobody was taking the time to determine what products a company makes, what services it provides, or what markets it operates in; profit would be equally impossible if nobody were taking the time to make products, provide customers with service, or actually work in those target markets.

This study focuses on "tech" positions (a very broad description) that require a Bachelor's degree. Here's what I'm left wondering after reading this:

Are they adjusting for the fact that a low-skilled tech position (tech support) in 2000 paying $12/hr did not require a Bachelor's, but in the current workforce climate, the same low-skilled tech support job at the same pay rate commonly requires that applicants have "at least" an Associates, but preferably (read: we won't hire you if you don't have) a Bach

Seriously guys, are we complaining that wages are back up to.com levels? Am I the only one who remembers that as a few years of obscenely wasteful spending? Hell, I was a 16 year old making $40K a year back then.

Could you imagine a banker complaining that they aren't back up to 2006 level salaries?

Two (related) reasons that I have heard as to why IT isn't valued as much as it should be (I myself am not in the IT field, so this is more like hearsay):

Clueless PHB: This is partly the fault of those who work in IT not educating those higher up in the food chain. PHBs don't look on IT as producers, but as cost centers. So they try to skimp on hiring competent people. And the IT people don't have direct relations with the clients (in most firms), so when it comes time to decide bonuses or raises, IT is generally at the back of the line. While IT is what allows everyone else to raise money, the PHBs would rather look at a $60k fresher vs. a $120k experienced admin and ask why they shouldn't just outsource it for $45k. They don't see the downside in having a poor IT team even after it bites them (just fire one newbie and hire another in his place). One admin I know used this solution (based on "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming) after most of his team were outsourced (not because the team was bad, but because the PHB saw cost savings): everytime the outsourcing created a problem and someone tried to scream at him (he was their internal liaison to the external contractor) he told them to go tell PHB "we lost/cost $X extra because the contractor screwed up." Only when the PHB saw how much the "real" cost of outsourcing IT was, did he reverse the policy.

Taking Credit: As an old saying goes - the competent IT admin fixes problems before they happen. And then the PHB wonders why he is paying $X for new servers and infrastructure when the current system works fine. IT people should be more proactive about boasting about what they do. Sure, this is distasteful to lots of technical people. But guess what? Everyone else brags and lets their manager know (in a not so subtle way) of why they deserve more money: "I sold $YYY to MY clients". So the IT team needs to take credit for sales they help with. If an employee used a lot of resources to construct a portfolio for a client, it isn't all to the trader's credit. YOUR software and hardware helped him run simulations and generate the portfolio. So add THAT to your pitch. If one of the IT workers stayed up half the night so a client could get some figures/data - he should get credit instead of letting the suit tell the story. A knight wouldn't have killed the dragon unless he had a magic sword - but the armorer doesn't get any songs written about him.

The flipside is to be realistic about what you are doing - this isn't the dot-com boom. Don't expect riches for trivial work. If you do good/tough work, expect to be compensated as well (and let your bosses know why YOU are better than everyone out there). But if you just make a CSS/HTML page, don't try to claim you are God's gift to the firm.

One very important point that you may have missed is this -- tech IS very important. Even organizations who don't care about IT beyond basic file and print have a stake in making sure things they use work well. But, IT is one of those fields where you can still cover over massive, huge, big balls of fail with money to the right vendor or cheap labor. Because of this, companies don't like to pay for competent help, or if they do, they squeeze every last nickel out of it that they can because they feel it's a waste.

Also, "tech" is too broad. The desktop support guy changing toner cartridges, the help desk person changing passwords and the systems architect trying to make sure everything doesn't come crashing to a halt when you put it in the same room have very different jobs, skills and responsibilities. On the simple break-fix support/part-swapper side, the work is getting easier and more automated. This means that you can hire fewer people, and those that you do hire don't need to have as much specialist knowledge. I'm a systems engineer, dealing with Intel server boxes every day -- the vendors have resorted to putting an extra "Don't pull this drive out!" light on hard disks so that part swappers don't pull a second drive out of a failed disk array and cause data loss. Even though the failed drive has a big blinky red light on it. That tells me that customers have complained about this happening enough...so you can draw your own conclusions about skill sets. On the higher end, you just run into wage pressure, companies trying to get away with as little as they can.

I think part of the reason for flat wages across the board is just the overall impression that "computers are simple" now, so why do we need to pay these geniuses to run them? Anyone in corporate IT is keenly aware of the "consumerization" trend, where everyone expects all systems to be as seamlessly integrated as their iPad, no matter how complex.

So at least in "big corporate IT," there are a few things putting wage pressure on:

Automation - just like all the other office jobs, anything that isn't absolutely essential is being turned into an automatic process.

Ready supply of cheaper labor -...and the lack of understanding that cheap labor may not always be the best way to spend money, especially if you have to pay a consultant 5x that amount later on to clean up the mess.

Lack of standards and understanding - IT is still seen as a magic box, and any attempts at standardizing things (_cough_ITIL_cough_) have just made things worse and completely pigeonholed a lot of IT employees.

Vast difference in skill sets - It is still very difficult to tell whether or not the person you hire is a complete dud based on the interview. I think that a lot of organizations pay less simply because they don't know whether they're actually getting competent help.

CapEx vs OpEx - In the old model, you kept employees on staff for a long time, trained them and they learned the business inside and out. Now, accounting makes it cheaper to just hire the people you need, when you need them, and pay them out of the operating expense budget.

Things like this make IT a very difficult field to work in. I'm not stupid enough to call myself a rock star IT god, but I certainly feel I'm competent and do a good job. Fortunately, I have an employer who appreciates that (for now) and I do OK. The other class of people who are making serious coin in the IT "racket" are the nomadic consultants. How many places have you worked where these guys seem to parachute in out of the sky when a very narrow specialist problem needs to be solved, charge hundreds an hour for months, and are off to the next place requiring that same specialty just as quick as they came in? I know a lot of these guys personally (can't do the lifestyle if you're married or have any sort of ties to any one place or thing) and they're definitely not hurting. For those of us tied down by one thing

is that it's hard for a lot of managers to figure out who's valuable. Most smaller shops hire IT staff because they don't have the expertise in-house already. It's not like a cook that hires an assistant cook and can watch them and know if they are skilled or unskilled. I think most IT for smaller organizations are easy marks for unskilled IT, that can be incompetent and still appear valuable because the people doing the hiring and the managing can't properly assess a person's skills before OR after the hire.

And I think this hurts the average pay. I've seen this happen a lot around here, where idiots are working IT for someone and the idiot moves on, leaving behind the managers to think that they need to find a replacement "as good as Tim", and are completely astounded to find that their new hire Jason actually knows what he's doing and is a massive improvement. Leaves them wondering "were we paying Tim too much, or are we paying Jason too little?"

So now at least they know that good IT is worth paying more for, but the rest of the hiring pool out there that hasn't learned that lesson yet doesn't consider their IT all that valuable because they currently are employing an idiot and just have no idea how much more they could benefit from quality IT.

Y'all are making excuses for a much larger phenomenon. The implosion of the middle class. Here's [advisorperspectives.com] a comparison of wage growth for Americans from 1967 until 2011. Look at the various jumps in the curve. You can see the big jump in the late sixties of the lowest quartile, the clear results of the war on poverty. The economic doldrums at the end of the Carter Administration. The sudden increase during the Reagan first term, but take special notice of how the rise benefits the upper quintile and even more so the top 5% (and if you could see the top 1% and top 0.01% I think you'd see something shocking.) The subsequent fall during the senior Bush Administration followed by the boom of the Clinton years (and make no mistake, the booms during both Reagan and Clinton involved huge economic expansions in industry, heavy industry for Reagan and information industries for Clinton. Then junior Bush's Terms, and here's where it get's interesting. Notice the steady decline in advancement. The majority of Americans are seeing their wages crashing towards stagnation or worse. In fact looking at the lowest quintile, over the last 10 years they've had a 20% drop in real wealth. Even the first quintile has remained stagnant with extreme fluctuation. So this is not just an IT thing. The only folks to see dramatic increase in personal wealth over the last 10 years I in a group smaller than the top 1%.

While that was going on, the real wealth of Americans at large has been disappearing. Here's a brilliant lecture on the looming collapse of the Middle Class [youtu.be] and the economic forces responsible for the situations we all face today. Contrary to pundits conversations Americans spend significantly fewer inflation adjusted dollars on food, clothes, appliances and cars. Where they are getting killed is Cost of Housing, revolving credit and loan debt, Medical Insurance and drugs, Child Day Care, Cost of Fuel/Energy, that and there are new expenses surrounding electronic gadgets that have been a steadily growing part of the cost of living since the late 80s.

The Banks (both in banking, loans and real estate), Big Medicine/Pharma, and Energy have put the American Family in such a precarious position, that any small disruption or disturbance results in almost immediate financial collapse. The critical events facing Americans are Death of a spouse, Injury or Serious Illness, Divorce and extended Unemployment. Any of these (singly or in combination) are enough to initiate a cycle of debt, penalties and ultimate bankruptcy. Add to this growing inflation and the erosion of our savings and investments, and you can see that the American Family is under extraordinary financial stress. The American dream for a growing population is just being able to get by.

In many cases I agree with this....or at least for failing to move out of their 'comfort zone'. I see lots of people who have done the same job (never mind at the same place for almost 15 years). I'm not calling these people cowards, as there's something to be said for comfort... but risk = reward.

It is not the current economic problems. Real wages in Canada and the US have not increased since the early 1980s, and in some cases have dropped. We are still paying the price for the deeply flawed economic policies of Reagan and Mulroney.

If your plumber fucks up you can end up with thousands of dollars in water damage. If your electrician fucks up, your house can burn down. That's why we pay them fairly well and insist that they become certified.

I don't know why you think coding on a large project is easy either. The skillset required is not easy to find, and there are a whole lot of assholes who can make a total mess of your project and cost you thousands in delays and additional work because they don't know what they're doing. That's one of the big reasons you don't see as much coding outsourced these days. 5 or 10 years ago everybody was doing it, and also discovering that the product they got back was of poor quality compared to stuff from their in-house coders. It is very expensive to fix bad code.

In my state it takes years to get a plumbing license and in order to do that you have to work as plumbers assistant for years etc. I'd much rather write code for $40/hr or even $10-$15/hr. Not that that is an option for me. My aging degree is in EE not CS.

I've always loved coding. Mainly c/c++ and assembly. I've always imagined that if I were to go back to college for a CS degree and somehow manage to get a job as a programmer that I would start to hate it anyway and I didn't want to learn to hate programmi

I'm not a script kiddie. I have an EE degree and absolutely loved writing assembly code as a teenager and writing C++ code with inline assembly, making small games etc. I got an A in every programming course I took in college and spent way too much time writing code to the detriment of my math and physics courses. Writing code is fun. It's like playing. I am of course jealous that you get payed to play.

What I want to know is how you got your first job out of college? Did you know someone? If I had graduated

Then you and your friend either suck, or live in a shithole. It's really that simple.

Either that or you are just overpaid and very, very spoiled.

Where in the hell do you live? Arkansas?

A suburb of Boston.

Which doesn't mean you're any good at it.

Never said I was, but the fact that you make shitloads of money doing it doesn't mean you are good at it either. In fact it doesn't mean shit except that you are one rich motherfucker.

Blah blah blah. Spoken like somebody who hasn't done jack shit in the real world. My projects range from 4 to 12 million lines of high level code. I'll give you complex. Yeah, I was writing my own assemblers and tools (and making good use of them too) back in the day.. but anybody who works with current production level code in anything but the most trivial system knows what a pain in the ass so-called "high level" code can be. And yea, there are times when you can't just throw more hardware at it.

Depending on how you define "jack shit" it is true that I haven't done it. I took the only job I could find outside of college. It wasn't manual labor, but it sucked and only paid $7.50/hr. I was just happy that I didn't have to spend the rest of my